The New YorkerModify

Thrilling news: it’s time to decide what health-care plan you’ll be opting in to for the coming year. Given the feedback we’ve received about how limited and expensive health care has become in this country, we’ve made some updates to our available offerings. Please choose from the following options.

The Basic Plan

This is our most popular plan. It covers things like breathing (allowed, no co-pay), sleeping (hint: you must pretend to sleep in order to fall asleep), and eating (you pay for your own food). No other coverage is provided. This is an ideal choice if you are immune to all diseases, and are also immortal.

The Catastrophic Plan

If the San Andreas Fault opens up, we’ll send Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson to help. Not to help you, specifically—he’ll just generally lend a hand in California. Maybe he’ll leap from one building onto another building. Very cool stuff.

The Become-a-Doctor Plan

This plan costs sixty grand a year and includes a residency at a local hospital, where you’ll learn everything you need to know in order to eventually become the primary-care physician to yourself, and everyone you know.

The ChatGPT Plan

This one’s pretty self-explanatory. In fact, if you want more information about this plan, you should ask ChatGPT. Pro tip: type “please” before your prompts and the large language model turned doctor might give you a better diagnosis.

The “Looney Tunes” Plan

If a piano falls on your head, or you run off a cliff, because you thought that a painting was a road, you will be tended to by a cartoon rabbit in scrubs.

The Plan Within a Plan

You have to sign up for this plan to read what the actual plan is.

The “Master and Commander” Plan

You begin your plan aboard a frigate. You have been wounded, but you are the only doctor on the ship. You need to perform surgery—on yourself. “I do this with my own hand,” you say, holding a mirror up to yourself as you operate. You sew yourself up. You’ll finally be allowed to explore the Galápagos Islands. It’s what you’ve always dreamed of. You’re billed in full.

The “Ocean’s Eleven” Plan

A bit simpler than the previous film-based plan. If anything happens to you—anything at all—you’ll have to pay for it by pulling off a heist with a ragtag group of thieves.

The Lottery Plan

This plan is just a state-lottery ticket. Good luck!

The WebMD Plan

This plan assumes the worst-case scenario. You’ll be pre-pre-billed (something we just made up) for your entire out-of-pocket max.

The Identity-Theft Plan

Simply steal someone’s identity and use their health insurance. Fingers crossed it’s not the WebMD plan.

The Really Good Health-Care Plan

This one’s only available to the people who write and pass laws about health care. It’s really, really good. Bummer you can’t have it.

The Trolley-Problem Plan

You can either get yourself health care while keeping five others from obtaining coverage, or give up your own coverage so that we won’t run over those five people with a trolley. Does that make sense? You have ten seconds to decide.

The Prayer Plan

We will pray for you. Fifty-dollar co-pay per prayer.

The Ice-Bath Plan

This is a health-care plan made popular by the wellness community. Basically, you cover the cost of a twice-daily ice bath for yourself, and we’ll pretend that that’s the only kind of health care anyone needs.

The Explanation Plan

If you can explain how a health-care plan works on the first try (no mistakes), you’ll get free health care* for a year.

*The free plan is the ChatGPT Plan. ♦

The protagonist of “The Secret Agent” isn’t a secret agent; he only lives like one. The reason for his clandestine maneuvering is apparent from the film’s first scene, when he pulls into a gas station on a country road. Before he can drive off with his tank replenished, the police show up. The officers’ arrival is no surprise: there’s a rotting corpse on the premises. What’s surprising is that they ignore the body. Instead, one of them questions the traveller and searches his car with a menacing nonchalance. This is Brazil in 1977, when the country was in the grip of a military dictatorship and, as the movie goes on to show, the notions of crime and punishment were severely warped: one incautious word to the wrong person was enough to send someone on the run.

“The Secret Agent” is a political thriller that’s also perhaps the year’s most profuse and populous movie, overflowing with sharply drawn characters who fill the screen with daring action and ardent purpose (whether honorable or corrupt). The movie’s writer and director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, crafts a tight story with startling freedom, leaping between characters in order to conjure their fateful interconnections, while giving them all, persecuted and persecutors alike, an identity and a voice. In the process, he brings history to life with bracing immediacy—a feat all the rarer for the audacious twists of cinematic form with which he renders the movie an act of archival reclamation.

The man from the gas station, a middle-aged scientist called Marcelo (Wagner Moura), reaches his home town of Recife, on Brazil’s northeastern coast, during Carnaval, and he finds the city in a state of festive agitation. Arriving at the apartment building where he’ll be hiding out, he gets immediately soaked by gleeful kids with improvised water guns. But the sombre stakes of his trip quickly become clear when, moments later, he’s welcomed by Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), the den mother of the safe house, where she’s lodging others in similar circumstances. Sebastiana discloses her sympathies at once, asking him whether he had trouble en route with “the pigs.” Seventy-seven years old and a voluble, plainspoken, fiercely principled rebel fixer, she introduces Marcelo, who’s a widower, to a group of new neighbors, especially a woman named Cláudia (Hermila Guedes), a professor of dentistry, with whom Sebastiana instantly tries to pair him off. Then, when the neighbors are out of sight, she gives him some money, plus instructions for his new life, expressing her commitment to his cause with a furtive zipping of her lips.

The movie is divided into three parts, each with an enticing title that reveals and conceals just enough. The first, “The Boy’s Nightmare,” involves Marcelo’s fraught homecoming in the shadow of grief over his wife’s death—and his reunion with his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who has been staying in Recife with his maternal grandparents, Lenira (Aline Marta Maia) and Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), a projectionist at a local movie theatre. Bereft of his mother and separated from his father, the boy suffers from nightmares, but his immediate concern is altogether more common: Alexandre’s movie house has been showing “Jaws,” and Fernando—who’s obsessed with ads for the film—begs for permission to see it.

Meanwhile, a real shark has washed ashore; the movie’s MacGuffin is a human leg found in the creature’s belly. To investigate, the city’s wily and pompous chief of police, Euclides (Robério Diógenes), heads straight from his own Carnaval revels, covered in confetti and lipstick stains, to see the limb at an oceanography lab, where he’s joined by two other officers—his grown sons, Arlindo (Ítalo Martins) and Sérgio (Igor de Araújo). Euclides hopes to keep the discovery out of the press for reasons that soon become evident: a pair of hit men, a stepfather (Roney Villela) and stepson (Gabriel Leone), are working in town with the police’s tacit approval, dumping bodies from a bridge into the sea below.

However censored the Brazilian press was at the time, disappearances are still making the news, including that of a student who hasn’t been seen in several days—the dismembered victim, it’s hinted—who’s the subject of an article that appears in the film’s second part, “Identification Institute.” The title refers to a government office for issuing I.D. cards, where Marcelo, now neatly dressed and well groomed, begins an office job arranged by a well-placed sympathizer (Buda Lira). Marcelo has an additional motive for working there: by searching the institute’s archive, he hopes to fill in long-troubling blanks in his family background. At the office, the story menacingly triangulates, with Euclides turning up as part of an underhanded ploy to help a rich woman while denying a poor one justice. He befriends Marcelo—even as, during nocturnal rounds, he pals around with the hit men.

Mendonça, who is fifty-seven, grew up in Recife and has centered his feature-film career on the city, probing its politics and power dynamics in the dramas “Neighboring Sounds” (2012) and “Aquarius” (2016). He took thematic detours in “Bacurau” (2019), a futuristic fantasy set in a fictitious village elsewhere in the state of Pernambuco, and “Pictures of Ghosts” (2023), a personal documentary about Recife’s movie theatres. “The Secret Agent” is by far his most accomplished film to date, and the only one set during the era in which he grew up. The movie’s physical design conveys delight, wonder, and bitter nostalgia; it feels rooted equally in memory and research, aesthetic imagination and political conscience. With his choice of period-specific flourishes—Marcelo’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the office’s manual typewriters under plastic dust guards, sidewalk pay phones surrounded by modernistic bubblelike booths—the director embraces the fashions and music of the time without losing sight of the brutal misrule associated with them.

Mendonça loves process, and in “The Secret Agent” he draws out scenes at length, unfolding games of concealment and evasion with understated precision and overwhelming tension, dispensing harrowing information with pinpoint restraint. His filmmaking teems with memorably eccentric details that reverberate with thematic significance. One of the movie’s most striking scenes is a curious digression stemming from a triviality—a telegram that Marcelo sends to a benefactor (Marcelo Valle) whose phone is likely tapped. Mendonça shows the telegram at each stage of its journey, as one clerk takes the message, another transmits it, a third prints it at the other end, and then a messenger carries it folded between his fingers to the sympathizer’s office. The oddly jaunty sidebar is capped by a chilling surprise: the addressee is shocked to find that the telegram has already been opened.

Paranoia suffuses the film without showiness or bombast—there are no distorting angles, no dunning musical cues. The ambient terror emerges instead in the careful behavior of characters in the crosshairs, as in two lengthy and finely wrought scenes—the movie’s mightiest emotional pillars—that show Marcelo talking with others under suspicion. In the first, he’s met, in a covert location, by a woman named Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), who informs him that he’s facing a death threat. He, in turn, tells her the story behind his persecution, a tale involving some of the authoritarian regime’s predatory profiteers, and, in so doing, offers a poignant portrait of an erstwhile ally, his late wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho). In the other such scene, residents of the safe house hold a spontaneous support-group session, during which Sebastiana, the matriarch, is asked about an old photo on her mantel and responds with an aria-like reminiscence of her grimly romantic political past.

Similarly, Mendonça reconstructs the city at large with fervor for its outward vigor and its inner life. The movie theatre where Alexandre works is a café-type hangout and an informal town square, but many of its everyday happenings harbor secrets, whether gruesome or heartening. In the film’s urban settings, which feature throngs of extras, day-to-day business gets drawn into the drama, packing Mendonça’s deftly composed widescreen images with passionate tumult. Even when showing small groups indoors, the director’s full frames convey a sense of turmoil, which is amplified by the cast’s vividly expressive performances—especially that of Moura, who carries the film with a star turn of suave determination, thoughtful energy, and preternatural calm in the face of mortal danger.

Amid escalating violence in the film’s third part, “Blood Transfusion,” Marcelo remains the still center, living in hiding in his home town, his identity split between public and private guises, his mind pressured to the breaking point by the effort of keeping up appearances. In spite of all this, he is endowed with an unshakably principled core, which Mendonça distills into an iconic physical symbol—an old-fashioned cassette deck that gains totemic power as it preserves Marcelo’s testimony. The resulting tapes give rise to a coup de cinéma of breathtaking audacity and simplicity, a leap in time that brings silenced voices back to life. With this device, Mendonça telegraphs a righteous indignation that’s nonetheless hopeful, a vision of openhearted generosity and multigenerational solidarity in the face of ruthless authority, then and now. ♦

Oil and masculinity: both are oftentimes crude, both are considered toxic in the twenty-first century. So it only makes sense that the two are as tightly bound as a bolt on a rig in “Landman,” the latest hit series from the neo-Western television auteur Taylor Sheridan, on Paramount+. At the center of the show is Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton), a grizzled and cynical but ultimately good-hearted consigliere to a reckless oil-field billionaire, Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Where Sheridan’s expansive “Yellowstone” franchise focusses on the landowning class, “Landman” depicts the considerably less glamorous world of a middleman toiling for the rich. Tommy drives his dun-colored Ford F-350 pickup truck, emblazoned with Monty’s M-Tex company logo, across the dusty, flat expanse of the West Texas Permian Basin, nicknamed the Patch. His job as the titular landman is to secure leases for oil extraction, to manage crews of roughnecks, and to deal with local government and police. As he races to solve a pileup of crises—leaking oil pumps, encroaching drug cartels, mysterious highway crashes—he is the show’s existentialist antihero, equipped mainly with wits and cigarettes and Thornton’s sardonic fluency with expletives. In “Landman,” oil pollutes the landscape just as machismo pollutes the soul, resulting in feuds, beatdowns, and broken families. But in Sheridan’s telling the toxicant is also a salve: oil leads to wealth, and wealth enables escape from the oil fields; masculine posturing, judiciously deployed, leads to power over other men as well as the grudging respect of certain uppity women who have the temerity to become lawyers or chief executives.

To a traditional prestige-TV viewing audience, “Landman” ’s politics are noxious. The show is nakedly anti-environmentalist; in one infamous scene from the first season, Tommy makes the factually absurd argument that wind turbines are just as bad, if not worse, for the planet than oil wells. The screenwriting plays fast and loose with sexist stereotypes; Tommy’s ex-wife, Angela (played by Ali Larter), with whom he rekindles a relationship, is a kind of red-state Manic Pixie Dream MILF, flaunting her cleavage, giving road head, and acting crazy when she’s getting her period. (“I need a Midol and a fuckin’ margarita,” she whines in one of the many hit-or-miss one-liners that punctuate the script’s more naturalistic dialogue.) But something about “Landman” has made it a sleeper hit even among a liberal audience, particularly with the recent launch of Season 2. The show is whispered about cautiously, lest one’s enthusiasm cause offense: I’m kind of . . . into it?? My colleague Inkoo Kang wrote in August that its initial season demonstrated “how conservative shows might be a damn good time.”

Part of the appeal lies in getting a voyeuristic glimpse into the workings of a specialized industry awash in money, not unlike how watching “Succession” provided a behind-the-scenes view of media mergers. We see the profit-sharing splits of oil leases, the refurbishing of old wells, and the lobbying confabs where wealthy owners in cowboy hats make handshake agreements. “Landman” is based on the reported podcast “Boomtown,” whose creator, Christian Wallace, is the series’ co-creator, giving its portrayals of the oil trade a journalistic frisson. The show’s aesthetic choices also complicate its seeming enthusiasm for extractive capitalism. Drone shots depict barren land studded with eternally spinning pumpjacks silhouetted against sunset haze, bringing to mind an Edward Burtynsky photograph or a Werner Herzog documentary. The soundtrack intersperses recognizable country hits with sweeping ambient guitar compositions by Andrew Lockington that are reminiscent of the post-rock band Explosions in the Sky. These artsy flourishes are the drizzle of artisanal jus on the plotline’s chicken-fried steak, mingling their flavors to the benefit of both.

Ultimately, the show’s success may come down to the charismatic force of its central character, who crystallizes the mood of our moment. Thornton, as the indebted and alcoholic Tommy, pulls hangdog faces and looks as exhausted with the state of the world as the rest of us feel. Thornton embraces the physical realities of late middle age to an extent that seems almost daring–his skin sallow, his beard scrubby, his worn-in clothes practically wafting sweat and oil and tobacco fumes through the screen. Nothing about him is aspirational save his attitude of charming fatalism. As he laments early in Season 2, after he has been tortured and nearly killed by drug smugglers run amok on Monty’s land, “Life pulled out its big dick and beat me over the head with it.”

The second season picks up after Monty’s death from stress-induced heart attacks. His wife, Cami (Demi Moore, the female character with the most agency—which is to say the most wealth), is now the owner of M-Tex, and Tommy is its president. Tommy’s son, Cooper (Jacob Lofland, with a face of fine-boned sorrow), spent the first season working M-Tex rigs and enduring disaster after disaster, including the death of his crewmates in a well accident. Now hustling as an independent oil prospector, he hits a potential fortune. Meanwhile, he’s managing a fitful romance with his late crewmate’s widow (Paulina Chavez) and an unwitting financial relationship with a cartel kingpin played by Andy Garcia. The first few new episodes set up higher stakes and deeper, more slow-burning problems than those of the first season, which often had a snafu-of-the-week formulaic quality. The writing is a degree subtler; there are fewer complaints about green tech and more anti-corporatist spiels, such as Tommy’s against Kellogg’s breakfast cereal or a roughneck’s enthusiasm for homemade venison breakfast tacos over McDonald’s, because the former are “clean fuel.”

What saves “Landman” from the sheer pulpiness of, say, the Netflix series “Hunting Wives,” another exemplar of conservative-leaning television, are the growing signs of plausible inner lives beneath the gendered caricatures. Tommy and Angela’s post-divorce reunion, against both of their better judgments, becomes a source of winning stability in Season 2. Angela and the couple’s daughter, Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), have fallen into a kind of “Gilmore Girls” maternal buddy-comedy dynamic; in one scene, Angela shepherds Ainsley to a college-admissions meeting in which Ainsley delivers an impassioned, hilarious speech to a shocked administrator about why cheerleaders should be allowed to date football players. There is texture even to peripheral characters, including Ellie (played with warmth by Robyn Lively), a waitress at the local watering hole the Patch Café, where every morning is some early-shift oilman’s happy hour. The tongue-in-cheekness of the whole endeavor is evinced by my favorite running bit, the frequent, presumably paid-for placement of bottles of Michelob Ultra, an upscale light beer that even the recovering Tommy drinks copiously. (Dave Infante wrote in the beverage publication Vine Pair that the idea that “a bunch of roughnecks and rogues in the Permian Basin prefer a beer known for its low calorie count and high price is hard to accept.” I accept it as magical realism.)

Sheridan’s cowboyish depiction of the oil industry can still be hard for this unpatriotic East Coast liberal to stomach, especially given that real oil companies seem to have embraced the show as a P.R. opportunity: for Season 2, the American Petroleum Institute has reportedly purchased a seven-figure commercial campaign featuring “real landmen.” But “Landman” is not particularly effective as propaganda; it does not inspire dreams of oil extraction much more than “Breaking Bad” did of meth dealing. The oil wells crank out money but they also churn through lives, and any liability on the corporations’ part is papered over with meagre settlements and N.D.A.s. The only winners are those wise enough to cash out early and leave the industry behind, and no one wins for long. As Tommy, our West Texas Sisyphus, says from behind the wheel of his gas guzzler, “I’m driving to my next calamity.” ♦

On October 10th, in a cabin on a sleeper train operated by Ukrainian Railways, I found myself sitting across from a quiet young man named Klim Milchenko. The train had set out from his home town of Zaporizhzhia, a city in southeastern Ukraine, at 8:48 P.M. the night before. About sixteen hours later, after travelling more than five hundred miles, it made a stop in Lviv, where I boarded. Milchenko and I were both bound for Poland. I was going to Kraków, on a hastily planned vacation. Milchenko was en route to Wrocław, where his mother lives. I planned to return to Ukraine in ten days. Milchenko didn’t know if he would ever go back.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian government barred nearly all men between the ages of eighteen and sixty from leaving the country. This year, on August 28th, it lifted the ban for men under the age of twenty-three. Milchenko was twenty-two—he was on the train that day because he wanted to get out while he legally still could. Never mind that the current age for draft eligibility in Ukraine is twenty-five. The government had already lowered the age once, in April of 2024. Who’s to say it won’t lower it again? Not wanting to wait to find out—and, in the meantime, risk being killed by a drone or missile in one of Russia’s frequent attacks on Ukrainian cities—Milchenko decided to leave. He told me that he didn’t feel guilty about it. “When you have friends who have been killed, when you see how soldiers are living on the front line, when you see how that could be your life, it’s a very scary thing,” he said. “Maybe it’s selfish, but I just want to stay alive.”

Milchenko was living in Kyiv when the travel rules changed. He began packing up his apartment the next day. He sold his Yamaha scooter and said goodbye to his two remaining friends, both of whom were staying in Ukraine only because they were too old to go. He then took a bus to Zaporizhzhia to see his father, a fifty-year-old businessman who owns a small shopping center in the city. On Milchenko’s second day home, draft officers picked up his father during a traffic stop and took him to a conscription center. Milchenko went with his grandmother to visit him two days later. “My grandma was nervous,” he said. “She was afraid they might take me, too.” Milchenko was pleased to find his father in good spirits. He told Milchenko that he wasn’t sure where he’d be sent to serve, but that it wouldn’t be the front line. “When we left, I felt like he would be O.K.,” Milchenko said.

Milchenko boarded the train to Poland with two backpacks. (He had mailed ahead a large box of clothes.) He spent most of the journey sleeping and watching YouTube on his phone. When we were thirty minutes from the border, a steward came by to tell us to be ready with our travel documents. Milchenko had been preparing himself for this moment for weeks. He had checked, and double-checked, that his military registration, which Ukrainian men get when they turn seventeen, was up to date and had watched informational videos posted on TikTok about, among other things, what to say to Polish immigration officials. “If they ask you how long you plan to stay,” a job recruiter advises in one video, “say a few days, or a week, at most.” Milchenko looked nervous.

The train came to a stop at a border-control station. Outside, it was gray and raining. A drug-sniffing dog peeked its head in our cabin, followed by a Ukrainian border guard who appeared to be only a few years older than Milchenko. The guard took our passports and looked over Milchenko’s military registration. He returned with our passports an hour later.

“Klim Milchenko?” the guard asked, reading from the photo page of Milchenko’s passport.

“Yes,” Milchenko replied. “That’s me.”

The guard handed him back his passport without saying a word. The train didn’t leave the station for another two hours. When the steward came by our cabin again, Milchenko asked why we were still sitting there. The steward said it was because two men had been detained. I don’t know who the men were, or if they were allowed back on the train.

The war in Ukraine is a war of attrition. And even before the Trump Administration presented, last week, a twenty-eight-point plan to end it—a plan that, at least in its initial form, would require Ukraine to surrender territory, reduce the size of its military, and promise not to join NATO—Russia, with a population more than three and a half times the size of Ukraine’s, had taken the upper hand. On October 27th, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, told reporters that Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainian troops eight to one in the ongoing battle for Pokrovsk, a strategically important city in the eastern region of Donetsk. Then, earlier this month, Russian forces took advantage of dense fog to capture fifteen square miles in the neighboring region of Zaporizhzhia. According to Deepstate, a Ukrainian organization that monitors changes on the battlefield, it was Russia’s largest single-day territorial gain of the year.

Elsewhere, Russian missiles have devastated Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leading to power outages across the country and further demoralizing a public that is increasingly fed up with the war, and whose patience with the Zelensky administration is being tried by a corruption scandal involving a hundred million dollars in kickbacks allegedly paid by contractors in, of all things, the energy sector. Morale among troops is equally, if not more, diminished, as many wait for replacements that have yet to come. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men have gone into hiding or fled abroad to avoid military service. Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service estimates that about seventy have died trying to escape through forests and across rivers. And many of those who have been drafted and sent to the front line have deserted their positions at the first opportunity. “They just start walking west,” a soldier who has been fighting near Pokrovsk told me. “If they don’t get killed by a Russian drone, they’re usually picked up and brought back to the front. Then they wait and try again. No one can make them want to fight.” Between January and October of this year, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office reportedly opened more than a hundred and eighty thousand cases of desertion and absence without leave, bringing the total since the start of the full-scale invasion to three hundred and eleven thousand.

In the midst of such an acute manpower shortage, the Ukrainian government’s decision to give thousands of young men the option to go abroad has divided military experts. Zelensky has defended the new travel rule by saying that it will help dissuade young men from leaving at an even earlier age. “If we want to keep Ukrainian boys in Ukraine, then we need them to finish school here, and parents must not take them abroad,” he said at a press briefing after the rule went into effect. “But they are beginning to take them abroad before they graduate. And this is very bad, because at that time they lose their connection with Ukraine.” He went on to say that the change would have no impact on the country’s defense capabilities. Simon Schlegel, the Ukraine program director at the Center for Liberal Modernity, in Berlin, told me that while that might be true for now, the new rule could lead to problems in the future. “It narrows the mobilization pool for three years down the road when these men would become eligible,” he said.

The new rule has also been criticized by some of Ukraine’s closest partners. In a phone call on November 13th, the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, asked Zelensky to do something to prevent so many young Ukrainian men from coming to Germany. They should “serve their country,” Merz said after the call, though he may have his own country in mind, too. Although figures vary, the number of Ukrainian men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two entering Germany rose from nineteen per week in mid-August to between fourteen hundred and eighteen hundred per week in October, per the German Interior Ministry. (Since the war began, Germany has granted what’s known as temporary protection to more than 1.2 million Ukrainians, the most of any country in the European Union.) Poland, too, has seen a major influx of Ukrainian men in the same age range—more than a hundred and twenty-one thousand since the end of August, according to the Polish Border Guard, up from about thirty-four thousand over the previous eight months. Many of those men will pass through Poland on their way to somewhere else, but others, like Milchenko, have decided to stay. “It feels like I’m starting a new life,” he said.

Klim Milchenko by the Oder River.

Photograph courtesy Klim Milchenko

In early November, I went to visit Milchenko in Wrocław. We met at a café across from a KFC in the city’s Old Town. A bronze statue of a gnome, one of more than eleven hundred scattered around the city, stood out front. Milchenko, who is tall and slender, with short light-brown hair, was wearing a black sweater, gray jeans, and sneakers. He was only slightly more relaxed than he had been on the train. Sipping a pumpkin-spice latte, he told me that he had been spending much of his time since arriving in Wrocław looking for work. “I’ve sent my C.V. to thirty different places,” he said. “So far, I’ve only heard back from a swimming pool. I told them that I had worked as a lifeguard in Kyiv, and was certified, but they said they wanted someone else.”

Milchenko speculated that the swimming pool was looking for someone older—or a native Pole. He’d heard stories of Ukrainians in Poland being discriminated against, and worse. In September, someone spray-painted “to the front” on the hood of a Ukrainian woman’s car, and a thirty-two-year-old Polish man was charged with shooting and seriously injuring a Romanian man whom he thought was Ukrainian. Both incidents occurred in Wrocław. Nationwide, polls show that public support for accepting Ukrainian refugees has been slowly but steadily declining. It’s currently at its lowest level since Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014 . Poland’s new President, Karol Nawrocki, has vowed to tighten restrictions on the government support they receive, and the far-right Confederation Party has accused Ukrainian men who moved to Poland of “burdening Polish taxpayers with the costs of their desertion.” (A study conducted by Poland’s National Development Bank found that Ukrainians actually pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.)

Whatever the reason he was turned down for the job, Milchenko tried not to let it discourage him. “I’m sure I’ll find something,” he said. He was in the process of getting his Polish driver’s license. His mother, who moved to Wrocław in 2019, has a car that she rarely uses. “My mom’s old boyfriend is a taxi-driver,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind doing that.” He also knew a Ukrainian guy who had recently gotten a job at a warehouse in town. “I’m waiting to hear what he thinks of it,” Milchenko said. “If he likes it, I’ll apply there, too.”

After we finished our coffee, Milchenko and I grabbed bagel sandwiches for lunch and walked to the Oder River, which bisects Wrocław. It was a cool, sunny afternoon, and the red-tiled roofs of the city gave way to a bright-blue sky. On our way to the river, we passed a seventeenth-century Baroque church whose foundation stones were pocked with bullet holes from the Second World War. We tried to go inside, but the door was locked. “I came here with my mom once,” Milchenko said. “It’s one of the most beautiful churches I’ve ever seen.” Milchenko had lived in Wrocław on and off for several years before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. During that time, he studied Polish—he now speaks it conversationally—and earned money by delivering food for Uber Eats on his bike and working at an Amazon fulfillment center. He eventually enrolled in a computer-science program at the local campus of a private university. “I had a girlfriend and was starting to make friends,” he said. “It was probably the first time I felt good in Wrocław.” In November of 2021, he went home to Zaporizhzhia to apply for a new passport. Then, three months later, the invasion began, and he was barred from leaving.

Milchenko moved to Kyiv in May of 2023, in part to be farther away from the front line. (At the time, Russian forces were roughly twenty-five miles south of Zaporizhzhia.) He got the lifeguard gig, and spent the first few months on beaches along the Dnipro River. One day, an air-raid alert sounded while he was on duty on Trukhaniv Island. He pointed everyone who was there in the direction of the nearest shelter, but almost no one went. “The alerts had become a part of daily life by then,” he said. “Most people, including me, just didn’t take them seriously.” A few minutes later, a missile exploded in the water about a half mile away, next to a bridge. Milchenko ran into a nearby brick building and waited for the all-clear.

Like almost every Ukrainian I’ve met, Milchenko has become intimately acquainted with tragic and untimely deaths. Most recently, on April 2nd, he told me, a friend of his named Sasha was sitting in his car outside the main train station in Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine, when a ballistic missile landed nearby. The explosion shattered the car’s windows, spraying Sasha with shards of glass. He was killed instantly. “He had gone to the station to pick up his mom,” Milchenko said. “He was such a good person. He didn’t deserve to die.”

We reached the Oder River, in the middle of Wrocław. Milchenko said he was grateful that the city had a river—and that he could visit it without having to worry about drone and missile strikes. I asked him how his father was doing. “He has some problems with his back,” he said. He’d soon get a medical exam to determine what kind of military duties he could be ordered to fulfill. For now, he was stationed in a small town north of Kyiv, nowhere near the front line.

As we walked across a bridge that led to the northern part of the city, Milchenko asked where I was from in the United States.

“Kansas,” I told him.

“Like Tom Sawyer,” he said.

“No, he’s from Missouri,” I replied. “But it’s right next to Kansas.”

“Have you been to the Mississippi River?” he asked.

“I have,” I said. “It’s huge, like the Dnipro.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” he said. “I’d love to see it someday.”

Milchenko isn’t sure how long he’ll stay in Poland. He’d like to take a road trip to Paris when he gets his driver’s license, and visit a friend in Germany. He’s also thought about trying to get a job on a crabbing boat in Norway. “I’ve seen videos on Instagram of Ukrainians who do that,” he said. “The work looks hard, but they make a lot of money.” I asked him whether, if the war were to end the next day, he would move back to Ukraine. He was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a hard question. I really don’t know.” ♦

Jeremy Bamber has a new opportunity to clear his name. But will the British justice system acknowledge that it might have gotten this famous case wrong?

New Yorker subscribers get access to all of In the Dark’s previous seasons. Subscribe within Apple podcasts or at newyorker.com/dark.